The DID Experience in Childhood

If you have DID, what do you remember from your childhood in regards to the DID symptoms? Did you feel you were different at an early age or did you receive any messages from others that indicated you were different?  A friend of mine on the internet recently posed this question. I thought it was very interesting, and as I thought back, I remembered quite a bit. One memory led to another, to yet another. After I wrote it all out and read it, it gave me a new perspective and insight to my own self as a little girl---a little girl with DID. What do you remember?

I remember always knowing I was different because I couldn't feel like other kids seemed to feel. I didn't cry. I didn't get emotional. I tried, but I always felt numb and separated from my feelings. I wondered how other kids did it. Even if I fell and hurt myself, I didn't cry. I tended to react to things with numbness, distance, etc.  

I remember always being "in company" as a kid, and I remember the exact moment I realized that everyone else didn't seem to have this "company" and that I was better off keeping it secret. I was 8 or 9 and at recess at school playing with a friend on the trapeze. I mentioned wanting to show (insert name) something I could do on it. The person I wanted to show was someone inside, and my friend reacted quite strongly with shock, "Who?? She's not here!" Like I was crazy or like that "person" was an "imaginary friend" and how ridiculous that I would still have one let alone think they could actually see me doing flips on the trapeze. They were not imaginary to me. They were very real. I just learned not to discuss it anymore. Apparently not everyone had this.

I also remember being caught in regressions by my mother, and her yelling at me to stop it, that I looked stupid, and if I didn't I would be sent to my room. Once I was told to lie on the floor of the front seat of the car so no one could see me. That makes me very sad to remember that.

There is also one inside that does not talk. We call her The Quiet One. When she was out, my mother would scream at me and shake me to get me to talk. She would make physical threats of punishment that scared me including informing me of “things the doctor could do” to “fix” it, and each time the Quiet One would scream/make a noise and then “run for the hills.”

She also used to disrupt my trance states. She would get angry at me and say that "they lock people up" for doing things like that. Wow! I had forgotten how cruel she could be. She couldn't stand it if I didn't act "just fine."

Basically I just learned not to talk about it, to hide it, and basically dissociate myself from the dissociation. (Weird, huh?).

I also remember in elementary school wondering why if I could go in and out of my body I couldn't go into someone else's body. I spent many days in school in 4th grade pondering that and trying desperately to leave my body and enter someone else's. I felt like I was just a spirit and my body just a vessel and why is that not possible?

I remember not feeling real. I remember pondering things that were not developmentally average for a 10-12 year old—existential things like, what is real? Are we really real? Is the world really real? Or is it just a figment of imagination? Is everyone real? Or just some people? Am I real? What IS real? Is there any reality? Or is it all imaginary? I definitely recall depersonalization and derealization being the norm for me and being aware of that and thinking of it, analyzing it, questioning it, trying to understand it, and wondering do other people feel this way? It didn’t help that my younger sister had the same issues. The two of us would reflect on this as we were growing up.

The thing that always amazed my sister and me was that we would dissociate at the same exact time sometimes. Of course we didn’t call it dissociation. We called it, “feeling like you’re there, but you’re not really there.” There were many times that one of us would say to the other, “I have that feeling like I’m there, but I’m not really there,” and the other would surprisingly say, “Me, too.” We wondered how we could both feel that way simultaneously. In fact we were in awe about it. Quite speechless.

I even remember the first time I was stuck outside my body. I recall the day my dissociation progressed to genuine DID, but I am not at a point where I can discuss that in detail.  It was something that happened at a hospital when I was four. I literally remember entering the hospital looking at the world from the inside out, and exiting the hospital looking at the world from the outside in. Life was never the same.

Copyright© 2010 by Lothlorien – All Rights Reserved

Comments

[Bee]

Wow we are so much alike! This has inspired to write my own post on this same topic. I hope that is ok? This is great, thank you for sharing!

-Bee

[Lothlorien]

Absolutely that is ok. If you do, you can come back here and post a reply with a link in it to your post if you want. I would love to read about your experience.

Lothlorien

[lostinamaze]

As a child I have experienced a number of things you have described but somehow until I read this didn't connect it to dissociation. And as an adult I didn't know what was happening to me as well. I kept going to the doctor and saying there's something wrong with me. I feel altered in my head. It was only about a year ago that I learned about dissociation. Much to think about here in relation to my childhood.

[WG]

This is sadly familiar. This is a great blog. Glad to find you. I will now stalk you on Twitter as well if thats ok :)

WG

[Lothlorien]

That is fine. Perhaps I will stalk you, too. ;)
Lothlorien

[Paul from Mind Parts]

Thanks for posting on the Carnival at Mind Parts. For some reason I have not seen your blog before. But I'm glad I found it. This is a great question. But I think you will find many different answers. In part it's because people in the here and now experience DID so differently. So it stands to reason that people in their youth would experience things differently too. For me, I think the partitions were such that I wasn't much aware of different parts. I think that was the purpose of DID for me back then; and it helped make things be seamless. But only when I look back at my life and how I functioned, do I realize that it was clearly partitioned. There are so many clues now. But I just didn't realize it was anything unusual back then. Lost time was my normal.

[Lothlorien]

Most of the stuff I remember, I too, thought was the norm. Some things, as I said, were made clear to me that this was not true for everyone. It is only now that I look back knowing I have DID that these things really click for me. I did feel different as a kid, but I didn't understand it. I pondered it some because I am just introspective that way and apparently always have been, but mostly I shoved it to the side when I didn't understand it.

[Lisa]

Yeah. That is incredibly familiar. I don't know if I feel validated knowing that or depressed that it's the norm for DID.

Lisa

[David]

I knew from a very early age that I had at least one alternate personality, and I tried on numerous occasions to explain this to therapists and also to my mother, as I knew there was something very not-right with how I experienced the world. Unfortunately my clarity in explaining it led it to be dismissed, since people with DID aren't supposed to be consciously aware of it. What the therapists missed was that I was consciously aware of my primary functional alter, but not aware of the more profoundly walled-off trauma-bearing parts.

I frequently felt as though I were not real, and/or as if the world couldn't be real, and/or as if I should be able to project into someone else's body, since I was not fully inhabiting my own body. Heavy stuff for us dissociatives to have to sort out as kids, and not much easier as adults, really.

[Lothlorien]

I am amazed at the similarities some of us share. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
Lothlorien

[Brynne]

Wow, this is very confirming for me to read this and find so many similarities with my childhood. It makes my diagnosis feel more real in a sense. Thank you for sharing this.